..This effect of pitch, not seen for the pure tones, might indicate that the exact location of the Nb generator source in the auditory cortex depends on the missing-fundamental pitch of the eliciting tone...

K AlhoDepartment of Psychology, University of Helsinki, FinlandPsychophysiology 35:211-24. 1998

..Source localization for the MEG counterpart of P3a (P3am) suggested that the auditory cortex in the superior temporal plane is involved in the neural network of involuntary attention switching to changes in the acoustic environment...

..Moreover, differences in ERP amplitudes and in their correlations with the reaction times between younger (7-10 years) and older (11-13 years) children indicated developmental changes in attentional brain functions...

Selective tuning of the left and right auditory cortices during spatially directed attention

..Whole-head magnetic recordings located the source of this native-language, phoneme-related response enhancement, and thus the language-specific memory traces, in the auditory cortex of the left hemisphere...

Fast vigilance decrement in closed head injury patients as reflected by the mismatch negativity (MMN)

..This pattern parallels known behavioural differences between children with these cleft types. Brain responses to rare sounds, in contrast, had no differentiative power with respect to the cleft type...

..It also interacted with the top-down control effects, attentional control having a stronger effect when attending to the ear that had a weaker sound intensity, as compared to when the intensities were equal...

..Even undetected deviant patterns of the attended ear and deviant patterns of the unattended ear elicited the mismatch negativity component of the ERP. These results indicate preattentive processing of complex sounds in the human brain...

Two separate mechanisms underlie auditory change detection and involuntary control of attention

..The present results suggest some differences in the attentional selection of sounds on the basis of their location and pitch consistent with the suggested auditory "what" and "where" processing streams...

..Thus, the ERP scalp distribution differences between the location-related and pitch-related Nd effects may have been caused by activity of areas outside the STC, perhaps in the inferior parietal regions...

..We found that speech discrimination improved over time and the MMN, observed in all patients after 2.5 years of CI use, was first seen for the larger vowel difference and later for the smaller one...

..In conclusion, our results show both rate-dependent and attention-related modulations of STC indicating that both factors should be controlled, or at least addressed, in fMRI studies of auditory processing...

..Correlation between the RT increase caused by the distracting novel sounds and the amplitude of the LN elicited by these sounds suggested that the LN is associated with the degree of attention engaged by the distracting sounds...

..The correlation was higher in the posterior scalp areas. Our results suggest that the involuntary attention switching system, reflected by the P3a is sensitized as a function of decreased sleep quality...

..Here, a task designed to investigate with event-related brain potentials (ERPs) the neural mechanism underlying distraction was used to show abnormal involuntary orienting of attention in chronic alcoholism...

..Event-related brain potentials demonstrated the survival of an accurate representation of tone pitch in the auditory cortex. This result provides a link between short-duration buffering and permanent storage of acoustic information...

..In view of the fact that in adults MMN is elicited even with a 10s SOA, these results imply that the time span of auditory memory is considerably shorter in neonates than in adults and 8-12-year-old children...